WFMHT Method of Orbit Maneuver Detection Based on Space-Based Bearing-Only Measurement

Abstract

The method of orbit maneuver detection of space targets is investigated using the space-based bearing-only measurement, which aims to acquire a real-time or nearly real-time awareness of orbit maneuver in the space situation awareness. First, the model for estimating real-time motion of a space target is presented, which only uses the space-based bearing-only measurements. The innovation characteristics of the normal orbit and orbit maneuver are analyzed and compared. Second, based on the hypothesis test methods of the distribution characteristic of the stochastic sequence, the WFMHT (i.e., weighted fusion of multi hypothesis tests) method with the innovation is put forward to detect the orbit maneuver. Furthermore, the criterion of determining the weight coefficients is studied. Finally, the method is validated by numeric simulations. The results show that the highest gained success rate is up to 36% with the WFMHT method than the prevalent Chi2 method. With the WFMHT method, the detection system achieves a strengthened robustness with greatly shortened detection window. The research will be beneficial to construction of our space situation awareness system.